Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Lyman Johnson, July 12,
1990. Interview A-0351. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0351)

Author: John Egerton

Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Lyman Johnson, July 12,
1990. Interview A-0351. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0351)

Author: Lyman Johnson

Description: 115 Mb

Description: 36 p.

Note:
Interview conducted on July 12, 1990, by John Egerton;
recorded in Louisville, Kentucky.

Note:
Transcribed by Jovita Flynn and Jackie Gorman.

Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series A. Southern Politics, Manuscripts Department, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

Editorial practicesAn audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines.Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references.All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "All em dashes are encoded as —

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JOHN EGERTON:

I'm not sure exactly where's the best place to start, but let me start
perhaps by talking about Columbia. I read your account of your early
years in Columbia, and also the fascinating story you told about getting
on the train or the bus up here, I forget which, and going to Columbia
in 1946 when you heard about all the trouble there. That has been called
a race riot.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Sometimes it's called a race riot, and then sometimes a race disturbance.
It wasn't exactly a riot.

JOHN EGERTON:

It was an invasion, it looked to me like.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, when you call it an invasion, then that was the state invading the
town.

JOHN EGERTON:

Exactly. And more specifically, invading the black neighborhood.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Black neighborhood. It wasn't a riot—a race disturbance, but not a riot.
I take a riot to mean somebody is rising up and trying to rebel against
the status quo. Well, these Negroes were not rebelling. They were trying
to protect.

JOHN EGERTON:

They were defending themselves.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Defending themselves. Here was a Negro, the one Negro who started the
thing was a young soldier who had just come back from World War II. Is
this thing on?

JOHN EGERTON:

Yes sir.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

He had just come back from World War II, and he came back to see his dear
old mother. Well now, they came from a

Page 2

poor,
downtrodden, black community. They hadn't had anything to amount to
anything of this world's goods. The old lady was still kind of down and
out, but here the young man came back. He had just put in maybe three or
four years in the service, and he'd fought against the Japanese over
there in Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and all around over in that section of
the world. And he had been sold, three years, a bill of goods that all
of this was for American democracy, and for a finer way of life than the
rest of the world was having. And the kind of stuff that Hitler and Tojo
and Mussolini were dishing out wasn't a high life, but the American way
was good. So he comes back and goes back to visit his mother. She had
gone up to a little repair shop, maybe two weeks before he came, to get
her little radio repaired. Now, are you interested in all that
story?

JOHN EGERTON:

Well, I read all that in here, so I've got that account.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

So you don't need to. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

No. I don't really.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

The main point is that when the man was abusing his mother, "Oh, woman,
go somewhere, go hide. Get out of here."

JOHN EGERTON:

Did he call her a "nigger?"

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, he called her all sorts, "Nigger woman, get the hell out of here."
And this man was up there at the front of the store, and she was back
there begging the man, "Oh, go ahead, mister, and fix my radio. It
wouldn't cost much." But he was working on the point that the damn thing
was so bashed up and beat out, and so cheap to begin with, that it would
cost him more

Page 3

to fix it than to sell her a new one.
He could sell her a new one for the price it'd take to fix it. So he
said, "Go get you another one. That old thing isn't no good." But she
couldn't understand that. She just thought maybe all you had to do was
like put in a light bulb. It was ruined. So he got peeved with the old
lady, and then started cursing her. So this young man was up there at
the front of the store just beginning to boil. "Get out of here or I'll
throw you out." And the woman started backing up towards the front door,
and when she got up there where her son was, her son grabbed him and
said, "Look man, do you know that's my mama?"

JOHN EGERTON:

And they had at it, right?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Now, when he manhandled the guy, he said to the rest of the Negroes in
the front of the store, "Well, hell, that's what the government taught
me, how to handle the Japanese. Man to man, hell, I was able to protect
myself. So when I grabbed that man, I just threw him." That was an
attack on the white establishment for a black man, at that time.

JOHN EGERTON:

Threw him through a plate glass window?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. "Oh, what the hell are these damn niggers up to?" And that is
where, if there's any riot, that was all it was to it. They were going
to put down the riot right there. That wasn't any riot. That was just
one man's situation.

JOHN EGERTON:

And the guy got out of town, didn't he?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. When he looked around, all his boyhood days came back to life. He
remembered, "My god, this is the place where they lynch Negroes for
doing things like this.

Page 4

JOHN EGERTON:

I'm in trouble now, huh?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. "What can I do?" So he ran one block down the street and made a
turn, and when you turn in at that block, that is one block of Negro
businesses, little Negro businesses, little joints. And so he went back
down there, and of course, Negroes down there were shooting pool and
cursing and swearing and gambling and fighting and fussing and cussing
and carrying on, as usual, and he began to tell two or three of the
people down there, the owners of some of those places, what had
happened. They all got together and said, "Well, look man, we've got to
get you out of town right now."

JOHN EGERTON:

They did get him out. Did he come back?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Hell, we don't know what became of the man.

JOHN EGERTON:

You never saw him again?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I don't know whether anybody ever heard of that guy any more. I think
maybe he got to Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, and I don't think he
stopped before he got to Detroit. Now, in order to show Negroes, you
don't do that kind of stuff, then they—I won't say Ku Kluxers, but the
Ku Klux element, began to organize. "Let's go get us one or two, and
lynch them and that'll put them in their places. That'll bring fear to
all in the place." So the Negroes armed themselves for two or three
days. They publicly said they were going to lynch one or two.

JOHN EGERTON:

Now at that point, the state ended up troopers in there, National
Guards?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, the city police couldn't handle it, because the whites. . . . You
know, I said you come down from the

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courthouse, come
down one block. Now, I know all about this. I was raised in that town,
and here's the courthouse right here. Come down Main Street one block,
and there are four buildings there that my people own, on Main Street,
one block from the courthouse. And they were such imposing places that
there wasn't any Negro in town who ran a business big enough to rent the
thing. We rented those places to white people, see. Now, you come down
here, and we were facing Main Street, but if you come down this street,
there is the one block of Negro businesses.

JOHN EGERTON:

One block off of Main?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. That's all it was to it. But those Negroes armed themselves.

JOHN EGERTON:

What's the name of this street? Is that Franklin?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, no, Eighth Street. The courthouse is at Seventh Street. There's one
Negro block on Eighth Street. My uncle's and father's places were here
on Main Street just beyond Eighth Street, one block from the courthouse.
Negroes from all over the county and adjoining counties, some Negroes
who had come in, like this young soldier, had brought back souvenirs and
guns that they'd taken from the Japanese. They had all kinds of weapons.
I'm going through all of this to show you the difference between a riot.
A riot is where you are making an attack on somebody else, but these
people bottled themselves up in their little businesses. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

And just waited.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

And the white people were afraid to go down in there. So they marched
down Main Street, and the next street over is, I

Page 6

think, called Woodland. The next street over here is called Woodland,
Main and Woodland, and here is Eighth Street going across here. And that
one block, whites would parade up and down here and up and down here,
but nobody would go down in there. When the police started down in
there, the Negroes said, "Look, we have shot out the street lights, so
we can't see you. We can't see you. Now, don't any of you white folk
come in here, because if you do, we going to shoot the hell out of you."
And when the police started, Negroes did shoot on them. And when they
shot on them, that was the attack on constituted authority.

JOHN EGERTON:

Did that hurt anybody?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I think so.

JOHN EGERTON:

Your feeling was that several people got killed?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, I think so. The white people wouldn't want to admit it. They
wouldn't want to admit that the Negroes killed a single one.

JOHN EGERTON:

But you felt pretty strongly that they did?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I've got a feeling that some white folk got bumped off down there. They
kept it quiet because they couldn't admit even that much of a defeat.
But now, when you attack the police, the police may be wrong, the police
may be using poor judgment, but they represent constituted authority. So
then the police, the mayor, and so forth called in the governor, and the
governor sent in the state troopers and so forth, and they're the ones
that took over.

JOHN EGERTON:

Is it your feeling, when you look back on what happened subsequently,
that the governor and his representatives, all the

Page 7

way down to the National Guard and all, conducted themselves in a proper
manner or not?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Oh, I think the state authority used quite a bit of discretion. I don't
know whether we can give them credit for using proper conduct.

JOHN EGERTON:

Did they kill anybody?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I don't think so.

JOHN EGERTON:

Did they beat up on people?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I don't think so. You see, those Negroes were so well armed, and they put
it out.

I know what they told me. In the book I mentioned that I got off the bus,
and I had to go right straight through, from the bus station here across
town here, right through the places that were. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

A war zone?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. That were under material law. Every block they checked me, but when
I got to the last block, leading out here to this section. This is where
my father lived. My father and my uncle lived out here. They were old
men about 85, maybe 88. Now, they were living out there by themselves.
Now, my jive, my ruse, if you please, coming across here, was that I had
been in the service myself.

JOHN EGERTON:

You passed for white going through there?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, I let them assume. I didn't put them up to their foolishness, but.
. . .

JOHN EGERTON:

You didn't dissuade them from it.

Page 8

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I took advantage of every break I had. First, I had just been discharged
from the Navy. Second, it was winter time, and that little Navy pea
coat, you remember those things?

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah, with the high collar.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. And it fastened all the way up. I was still wearing it. It was very
warm and comfortable. So I had my Navy, I had my civilian clothes on
under, but I had that Navy coat on.

JOHN EGERTON:

Did you have a hat on, do you remember?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, I had my regular civilian hat. And every one of these places, "Hey,
where you going? Where you going?" "I came down to visit my father over
here. Just got out. Just got released about three weeks ago."

JOHN EGERTON:

And where your father lived, that was the only black residence in that
neighborhood, wasn't it?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

That's right. They said, "Well, where they live?" And when I told them
out here on East Ninth Street, well, these out of town guards had been
given a map, here was the Negro neighborhood over here, here's a Negro
neighborhood over here, here is a corridor going all the way out here to
the next town. Now, from this courthouse way on out there to the next
town, for five miles out that way, we're the only the black on that
side. So when I said I was going out to East Ninth Street, they didn't
know any better. They just assumed only white people out there.

JOHN EGERTON:

So you didn't tell them anything?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, it wasn't my business. So then I got through. But when I got to the
last checkpoint, these people said—this was about 2:30 in the
morning—they said, "Now look, fellow, you

Page 9

better stay
here with us until daylight because some of the. . . ." Now, this is the
way I surmised what was going on in the white mind. These were white
people telling me. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

Whom they thought was a white person?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I assume that they thought I was white, and this next point actually
makes me think that they actually believed I was white. "Look man, you
better stay right here with us until sunrise, because there's one bunch
of damn niggers over here and one neighborhood of niggers over here. And
they come down almost to this highway going out this way. And they swear
that for every Negro we kill, they're going to kill two whites. They
don't care who they are. They're going to kill two whites for any
Negro."

JOHN EGERTON:

That's what the guys told you.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

"So we've been told, by God, don't kill a single one unless you have to."
So I think they were telling me that they were under pretty strict
control there. He said, "You see, these are the damnest, meanest niggers
anyway in the world, and they're armed to the teeth, and they're willing
to die, and they're willing to kill. So we were told, Don't beat up
anybody. Don't kill anybody, and just keep order the best way we can.'
Now, you stay here until sunrise." And that's when I said to myself,
"Hell, if I stay here until sunrise, they might turn on me and do all
the things they were told [laughter] not to do," because they've told me all their secrets. You see
the point.

JOHN EGERTON:

Yes. All right, now, I've got your account here of all of this, and so I
don't need to probe that too far.

Page 10

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, okay.

JOHN EGERTON:

But I do want to get your impression of something out of that. I've got a
sort of a theory that this period of time that started in 1945 with the
end of the war and going up until about 1950, looking back on it now,
looks like a lost opportunity, a golden opportunity thrown away, for
whites and blacks in the South to make some peaceful accommodation with
one another and avoid all the bloodshed and trouble that subsequently
came down the road. You mentioned the war. We'd already been fighting
against racists. Hitler was the world's worst racist. We came home,
white and black, feeling good about having won victory.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Over there.

JOHN EGERTON:

Over there, in this kind of liberal war. And it didn't make sense at all
to come back and think that we were going to come back to a society that
was segregated.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

What about the young Negro soldier who came back to South Carolina . . .
?

JOHN EGERTON:

And got his eyes poked out.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

And they poked his eyes out. "Look, you're not over in Germany. You're
not fighting in Japan now. You're not fighting in Israel. You're back
down here in South Carolina, nigger." And they were the police that
poked his eyes out.

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah. So would you agree with this theory that this could have been a
time when people were. . . .

LYMAN JOHNSON:

That was an opportune time, yes sir. And just rational people should have
seen that that was the proper thing to do. If

Page 11

these
Negroes had gone from the cotton fields of Alabama and Mississippi and
the tobacco fields and cotton of Tennessee and Kentucky. . . . They had
been emancipated. Their eyes had been opened, and you can't close a
person's mind once it gets open. You can't pluck out of a person's mind
an idea that's growing and growing and growing and getting bigger and
bigger as days go by.

Look a here, some of those people—I was in the Navy, man. I was up there
at a time when they didn't have any place for an educated Negro. What
part of the service were you in?

JOHN EGERTON:

I was in the Army.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I was in the Navy, and the Navy admitted that they had no place for us
educated Negroes.

JOHN EGERTON:

I think at the end of World War II there were three Navy officers who
were black.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, no, they had. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

It was a small number, whatever it was, it was a very small number.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Long about, toward the end of the war, long about the middle of '44, or
maybe the beginning of '44, they made twelve ensigns, and they announced
then to all the rest of us that, "We're making twelve ensigns. We won't
make any more, and they won't be promoted." In other words, don't aspire
for anything. So what they did in my group, they had 47 of us so-called
educated Negroes stationed up there at Great Lakes. They didn't know
what to do with us. I remember Commander Caufield who ran Great Lakes.
He was the commander of the center. He told me, "Well, my God, sailor,"
that's what he called me, "You fellows,

Page 12

some of you
got more education than these officers that are appointed to serve over
you. We don't know what to do with you. We don't have the nerve to be
trying to tell you, when you outrank us in education. So you find
something to do on your own." I think there were about twenty of us who
decided that the best service we could render would be to run a school
for illiterates, and many a time, 5,000 black sailors would be dumped on
Great Lakes from down in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, right out of
the cotton field, hadn't been to school one day in their lives. We'd
take them in little batches for seven weeks. We said, "Give them to us
for seven weeks, and we'll have them passing what the public school
called third grade tests." We must have had something on the ball.

JOHN EGERTON:

Cause you did it.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

We did it. That was the biggest contribution that I rendered, and as I
look back over it, all that came to our school came there, they couldn't
read their names if you wrote them in boxcar letters on the blackboard.
Sometimes we'd check up to be sure. I'd write them on the board, and
say, "All who can read this will please take the afternoon off." And
they'd all sit there and just wait until somebody told them what it
said.

JOHN EGERTON:

So you knew they couldn't read?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Just sit there and wait to find out what did that say. So now that the
war is over, look how many people, who had not been out of their
town—we'd ask the question, you know, "Did you ever hear of Germany?"
"Yes." "Where is Germany?" "I don't

Page 13

know. Out there
somewhere. Up there near New York or something." See?

JOHN EGERTON:

Okay, here you are now: You've got a master's degree from the University
of Michigan. You've been in the Navy. You have taught school. The war
comes along and you go to the Navy. You get out and it's 1945, let's say
'46.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

'46.

JOHN EGERTON:

Okay, back there in your very own home town now this trouble breaks out.
And your Daddy's down there. He's an old man by now. What kind of
thoughts must you be thinking when you ride the, was it the bus or the
train?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Bus, at the back end of the bus.

JOHN EGERTON:

Back down there, sitting in the back of bus, riding down through
Nashville coming to Columbia, Tennessee, in the winter of 1946 to see
about this trouble. I mean, I said a minute ago, this was a golden
opportunity, but it must not have looked like one to you at that
point?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, it did, but if you're going to be effective and reasonably
successful, you mustn't do like Martin Luther King, going round bragging
about "I'm ready to go." You got to bristle up sometime, and say, "Look,
I fought not to go Heaven, but to enjoy Heaven here, to bring Heaven
right here." That's my philosophy, and most of these people were not
imbued with all the high falutin' philosophical ideas of Martin Luther
King, nonviolence. They said, "Why did we go in the trenches? Why'd we
go through all this? Why'd I leave my wife and children, two years?

Page 14

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. But the bus driver was going down Broadway, and it was crowded, a
white bus driver, all the seats were taken, and many people were
standing. When the bus leaves way up there in that end of town, it's
practically all white, but as you come down toward the Negro section, it
begins to fill in, fill in, fill in. So when it gets down here at the
middle of town, just about all the late comers, who have to stand, are
black folks. Then as you pull down a little farther, whites begin
gradually to get off, and Negroes fill in the seats, and then we go on
down. All back down in that section is the Negro section. Well, along
about midway point here, I'd already gotten on up there somewhere and
had gotten a seat, and this white bus driver, "Why don't you nigger
women get the devil away from me. I'm tired of you hanging around here."
I was in my Navy uniform then, more than just my jacket, see, my pants
and everything else. Had my white hat on. I got up and went up to the
front of the bus and said, "Don't call these women niggers anymore. That
ain't what I'm fighting for. Can you understand that?" That man, I guess
he weighed about 200 and I was weighing about 155. He could have picked
me up and thrown me out the window. "Don't you call these—that ain't
what I'm fighting for man. Where'd you get off calling these people
nigger women?" And boy, well, that's just typical.

JOHN EGERTON:

That's how you felt at that time.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, hell, that's what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for freedom.

Page 15

JOHN EGERTON:

Did you think that this—I mean, were you hopeful at all, or were you
pretty much in despair when you got back and saw the kind of shape we
were in in this country, particularly in the South, right here in
Louisville?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, I just figured that somewhere along the line sensible white people
would wake up to reality, and stop living in a fantasy world of race
superiority, and just recognize that maybe they had been sitting in the
most comfortable seats up until now, maybe they'd been receiving the
best benefits of our affluent civilization, but now, by God, you've got
to share some of this stuff from now on. Did you ever this song, "You
Can't Keep Them Down on Farm?"

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, that was the general idea. These poor people, not only poor blacks,
but poor kids from up there in Appalachia, poor white kids, they began
to find out that the world was not all up there in Appalachia. My gosh,
there's a great big world outside of Appalachia. They were surprised
when they got out, and found out, "Gee whiz, look what's all out here.
Look what these people have been enjoying all these years and we
haven't."

JOHN EGERTON:

When do you think you started having those feelings, Mr. Johnson?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Well, I tell you, my Daddy just about taught them to me when I was two
years old, one year old. I was brought up a civil rights man, and all my
family. My father taught us, "Now, you can't whip this white man. Can't
whip him. Get along with him. But use every trick in the trade to catch
up with them." For

Page 16

instance, I took three years of
college Greek. My father and my uncle were just that much—if white
people study Greek, you study it. If they study chemistry, you study it.
Whatever, how does he get to be in an exalted position? What avenues did
he follow to get up on top? Now, take a degree of humility along. Take a
degree of compassion along with you, but by God, get over the idea that
just because you're black, you're not entitled to go into the hotel
downtown there and get you a good meal. "Now, son, don't walk in there
tomorrow morning and fight the manager of the hotel because he won't
serve you. Because if you do, you'll get your head beat." So then, in my
family, we were taught how to be cunning enough to get as much as we
could with the least danger as possible.

JOHN EGERTON:

So you could live to fight another day?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

That's right. I told Martin Luther King right here in this town, I said,
"Martin, you can help us more if you stay alive. Now, you quit being so
reckless with your life. You can't help me dead."

JOHN EGERTON:

All right. Regardless of when these ideas got imbedded in your mind,
let's just say that in 1946 they were deeply impressed upon you.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, they were accentuated. I came back here one of the two or three
times that I came on furlough from the Navy to visit my family, I was
sitting on the bus here. Now, in Louisville you didn't have to sit in
the back of the bus.

JOHN EGERTON:

The city bus?

Page 17

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah. The bus driver was going down Broadway, and the bus was crowded—a
white bus driver. And some Negroes were—all the seats were taken, and
many people were standing and when the bus leaves way up there in that
end of town, it's practically all white. But as he comes down near the
Negro section, it begins to fill in, fill in, fill in—so when he gets
down here to the middle of town, just about all of the latecomers, who
have to stand, are black folks. And then, as you pull down a little
farther, whites begin gradually to get off, and Negroes fill in the
seats, and then you go on down all back in that section—the Negro
section. Long about midway point here, I had already gotten on somewhere
and had already gotten a seat. And this white busdriver, "Why don't you
nigger women get the hell away from me? I'm tired of you hangin' around
here." And I was in my Navy uniform. More than just my jacket. Had my
pants and everything, had my white hat on. And I got up and went to the
front of the bus. I said, "Don't call these women "niggers" anymore." I
said, "That ain't what I'm fighting for. You understand that?" Now this
man, I guess he weighed about 200 pounds, and I was weighing about 155.
He could have picked me up and thrown me out the window. "Don't you call
these—that ain't what I'm fighting for, man. Where do you get off
calling these people "nigger women"?" And boy—well, that's just
typical.

JOHN EGERTON:

That's how you felt at that time.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, yeah. Hell, that's what I'm fighting for—for freedom.

JOHN EGERTON:

But did you see anybody white who was willing to join that fight at that
time?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No.

JOHN EGERTON:

Between '45 and '50?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Oh yes, I had quite a bit to do with starting the Teachers' Federation,
Louisville Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. Now, at that time between
'45, no, we started back about 1942, '41. But from '41 to about '55,
white people, generally still steeped in white supremacy, belonged to
what they called the Kentucky Educational Association or the Louisville
Educational Association. I referred to them as the Association Gang.

JOHN EGERTON:

They were all white?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah.

JOHN EGERTON:

And was AFL? Was the Louisville Federation, was it all black?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, we started out, mostly Negroes started the thing, but we told the
national office, "Don't give us a charter until we get some white people
to join us, because we don't want a segregated thing. We've got a black
association and a white association. We don't want two federations,
black and white." I think our charter started out with 36 members. The
first 25 we got signed up were black.

JOHN EGERTON:

This was in the '40s?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

About '41. We could have gotten a charter with 25 members, but we
wouldn't start because then it would have been an all black affair. Then
after we got started, we'd catch hell getting whites to come in. So we
waited until we got some, to

Page 18

answer your question,
we got 11 people who were willing join with us. They liked the
federation attack on educational problems better than they did the
association. So they joined in with us. Then we were a mixed
organization. The Federation was mixed. Then on the local level, we sort
of soft pedaled taking in black members. We didn't just go out and
recruit black members. We did go out and recruit white members.

JOHN EGERTON:

Trying to get an even balance.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

The percentage was just about one fourth black in the school system, and
we were afraid, looking at the general situation from a practical point
of view, we were afraid to get more than one fourth or one third blacks,
because you've heard of what they call a little tilting point. So as
long as we could get whites to come in and be about two-thirds, if not
three-fourths, of the total membership, we could still count on getting
whites to come in.

JOHN EGERTON:

Okay, what about in the city at large. What about people like Barry
Bingham and Mark Ethridge and Wilson Wyatt? In that period of time, '45
to '50, did you look upon them as being even mildly sympathetic to what
you were trying to do?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, very much so. It took a lot of courage for Wilson Wyatt to try to
be a popular fellow with whites and still be as fair minded on the race
question as he was. It took a lot of courage on his part, and I gave him
credit for it. That's Wilson Wyatt. Mark Ethridge, I think he's the one
who came from Birmingham, Alabama.

Page 19

JOHN EGERTON:

No, he came from Richmond, Virginia, but he was a native of Macon,
Georgia.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Yeah, Georgia, and he used to be the editor of the Courier.

JOHN EGERTON:

Macon paper, and then he came up here to be the head of the
Courier-Journal.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Now, he could write some mighty fine editorials, and fair. But after all,
he had to be careful not to go too far, because it might cut his
bread.

JOHN EGERTON:

Wait just a minute. Now, let me draw you a little scenario here, and
challenge that statement just a little bit. If you look at Louisville in
1945, and compare it to Nashville or Atlanta or Birmingham or any of the
other cities in the South, Louisville looked fairly good.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Oh yeah, I agree with you.

JOHN EGERTON:

It had black policemen. It had black firemen. You didn't ride in the back
of the bus.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

In my early career, looking for a job, I settled on trying to locate in
one of two places, Knoxville or Louisville. I had a feeling that
Knoxville was more liberal than any other city in Tennessee on the race
issue.

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah, you might have been right.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

And in the balance, the little check points that I had, Louisville
outweighed Knoxville, and I nursed the idea of coming to Louisville.

JOHN EGERTON:

And you made a good choice. Compared to those other place, this place was
doing a better job. So my question to you

Page 20

is, if it
was already ahead of these places, and it had a liberal newspaper, and
it had a liberal mayor during the war, why would you feel that they
couldn't go too far? On the contrary, why wasn't this a wonderful time
for them to go the whole route, and open the restaurants and the schools
and the housing projects and all the other places?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

You'll have to ask them why didn't they do it. Why didn't they see that
it was to their benefit to do so?

JOHN EGERTON:

Did you feel critical of them for not doing that?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Them, who are them?

JOHN EGERTON:

Wilson Wyatt and the whole. . . .

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, I think they went as far as they could go. I tell you . . . let's put
it like this: The superintendent one day got after some white teachers,
and really read the riot act to them, the city superintendent. Now one
of them was a member of this group that was bold enough to join the
Teachers' Union, Federation, but most of those whites did it on the
quiet. They didn't want us to run any newspaper accounts of them being
outspoken union people or even members. Some of them didn't mind it and
became officers, and of course, they had to let their names be used. But
here was one woman who was trying to get along with the superintendent,
who was opposed to the mixing of the races, she said, "Lyman, you don't
know how this superintendent treats us white teachers. Sometimes he
clubs us over the head more than he does you black teachers." He called
us Negroes in those days. I said, "What do you mean?" Then she told me
about the meeting that they had two days ago where the

Page 21

superintendent said, "Every little thing you can think of
you come griping to me about it, and you don't like it. If you don't
like teaching in these schools we have here in Louisville, why don't you
quit before you get fired? You come bringing me all these complaints.
I'm going to chalk you up, and when you get so many of them, I'm going
to call it quits. I'm going to fire you."

JOHN EGERTON:

So they were under pressure.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Now, she said [inaudible]. He said, "You see, you're white.
Now, if you were a Negro like Lyman Johnson and that bunch, I would be
raising hell too. I just couldn't stand what they have to go through.
But you're white. Now, damn it, don't come complaining to me about
anything. You're white." She said, "And Lyman, you know, when we agree
with him that we're white, then we've lost our battle, and then he can
treat us worse than he treats you, because he sympathizes with you." Now
our mayor did practically the same thing. We went down to argue with the
mayor. We carried a committee of five people.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

Page 22

JOHN EGERTON:

I've just got a little bit of tape left. This is a continuation. You were
talking about Tarleton Collier.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Tarleton Collier was as nice a person as we'd like to have for his time,
for his time. I made the point quite often. For instance, at a national
convention of Teachers' Federation, there were some teachers that came
out from Atlanta who wanted to establish two chapters in Atlanta, one
black and one white. I took the floor and I argued against it like
everything. And this man, I had checked up on him, who was a big
promoter, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, there are some people who were
reared in the South, who perhaps have gone out of the South on occasion
but have gone back to the South to settle and establish themselves and
their careers, but here's a man who comes from the City of Brotherly
Love. He was reared, he spent most of his life in Pennsylvania, and now
he's down here in Georgia, he's down here in Atlanta, and he's promoting
a dead issue that the whites of the South are trying their best to
eradicate." I said, "That's what I don't like about some of these
northerners who go south and out-southern the southerners."

JOHN EGERTON:

But Mr. Johnson, here's really at the heart of what I wanted to ask.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

But wait a minute. Do you see the connection there between Tarleton
Collier and Mark Ethridge? Both of them came from the deep south.

JOHN EGERTON:

That's right.

Page 23

LYMAN JOHNSON:

And they were showing how they wanted to. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

They didn't fit the stereotype.

But here's the point that I find hard to understand. Here is Louisville,
Kentucky, in 1946-47-48. It doesn't have a Talmadge for a governor. It
doesn't have a Bull Conner for a police commissioner or any of these
racist segs for mayors and whatnot. It's got Wilson Wyatt. It's got
Barry Bingham. It's got Mark Ethridge and Tarleton Collier. It's got
Lyman Johnson. It's got Frank Stanley with a newspaper that had been
there since the '30s. It's got Central High School that's been—Central
High School started in 1888. Atlanta didn't even get it's first black
high school until the '40s. Atlanta didn't get a single black policeman
until 1948, and Louisville had a black representative in the state
legislature in '36. And I'm saying, this must had been accomplished. Why
didn't this city go ahead and do the rest of it? Why didn't it become
the national model of a real integrated city?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

The only answer I can give is [pause], "Why aren't you Negroes satisfied? Look how good we are to you.
Now, don't bug us too much." That was the attitude. "Don't bug us
anymore." And then they'd do all that you just mentioned. "Just look
around, look around." What did the superintendent tell me when I was
asking him—I was leading a committee of black teachers, fussing and
scuffling and trying to get equal pay with white teachers back in 1939,
'40, and '41. We were getting 15% less pay. When we were given a job,
we'd be put on the schedule with white teachers and then clipped 15% for
no other reason than the

Page 24

fact that we were black.
The superintendent called me out one day. He brought in five Negro
principals and five Negro counselors and me. He had eleven of us Negroes
out there at his board of education, and for an hour and a half
practically every statement he made was, "Mr. Johnson, don't you see how
nice Louisville is in comparison with Birmingham and Atlanta?" I said,
"Mr. Superintendent, right out of your office upstairs I've already
gotten the information. Your statistics department furnished me with the
information, and I think at one of the cities, I think Birmingham, I'd
be getting 56% of what the white teachers made. Over in Atlanta, I think
it was 64%." He said, "And you're not satisfied with 85%?" I said,
"Hell, no, I want 100%. That's your trouble, Mr. Superintendent. I got a
master's degree from the University of Michigan, and you've got a man
teaching in the white high school who has a master's degree from the
University of Alabama, and he's making 15% more money than I do. He
teaches the same number of students. He teaches out of the same
textbook. We have the same number of classes, and the same number of
days per week, same number of hours per week, and he gets 15% more. I've
got a master's degree from a school that doesn't recognize the school
that the other man got his masters from." I said, "How do you square
that with fairness?" He said, "If you're not satisfied with the way we
treat Negroes, why don't you quit?" "Because I don't want to quit.
You're going to have to fire me, man." See?

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

Page 25

LYMAN JOHNSON:

He was trying to show me I ought to "behave," in quotation marks.

JOHN EGERTON:

You ought to be satisfied?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I ought to be. He said, he used the word, "Aren't you satisfied? You're
making 85%. Look, look, you show that you know what's going on. If you
lose your job here, where else in the state of Kentucky will you get as
much as you get here?" Well, I guess at Bowling Green I would have
gotten about 65%. I'd have gotten about 65% down in Hopkinsville.

JOHN EGERTON:

So the very fact that you were ahead of other people was used as an
excuse not to go any farther.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

They were, oh, shall I use the word, kind of smug, sacrosanct. They were
sort of feeling like we're so much better Birmingham. Oh my goodness!
Mobile, Alabama, you might not get 50%. In my hometown in Columbia,
Tennessee, they offered me $55.00 a month, Columbia, Tennessee, $55.00 a
month with a year beyond a master's degree. And I said, "Well, Mr.
Superintendent, if a young white teacher started out with no
experience—I admit I have no experience as a teacher, but I do have a
heck of a lot of academic credit—if a white teacher comes in with a
master's degree and a year beyond a master's, in your field, not in
education courses, but in your field, how much would you give him?" He
said, "$110.00." I said, "You'd give him $110 and give me $55! How you
square that." He said, "You see, that's the schedule. You get 50% of
what the white people get." I said, "You can take the job and stick it
up your ass." And my father

Page 26

said, "Son, I didn't
teach you, that isn't the language I taught you." I said, "Papa, this is
a new day. This is a new day."

JOHN EGERTON:

All right, so we went on through the '50s, and bits and pieces of the
South came straggling along to the starting line, and by 1954 when the
Brown decision came down, it was like the
beginning, you know? It wasn't the accomplishment of anything. It was
just the very start after all those years, and it's taken Louisville
just as long now, almost, to get where it is as Birmingham and Atlanta
and Nashville.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I don't know, I think it's in the book there, I don't know, somewhere you
may have picked it up. I used to be on the Board of Education here?

JOHN EGERTON:

Right.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I found the Board of Education, I chided the board any number of times,
right in open session. I said, "Oh my God, Mr. Superintendent and fellow
board members, you're dragging your feet on this business of
integration. The hometown that I come from, and the little town down
there, it's famous all over the world for having started the Ku Klux
Klan—Pulaski, Tennessee. Why they're so far ahead of you in integration
that you ought to go down there and find out how to do it." Yeah, yeah,
I told them.

JOHN EGERTON:

Do you think that left to its own devices the South would ever have done
voluntarily what it finally did when the blacks went to the streets and
the Supreme Court handed down the decision it handed down?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Hell, naw.

Page 27

JOHN EGERTON:

Never would have happened?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I'd have been out there picking cotton. Hadn't been for the Civil War,
I'd have been out there picking cotton right now. Oh, I guess they'd
have made me, they'd have looked at me and said, "Oh, he'd a pretty
smart nigger, we'll make him supervisor over a bunch of other damn
niggers." I guess they'd have made me head waiter.

JOHN EGERTON:

But the desegregation of society?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Hell, naw.

JOHN EGERTON:

Never would have happened?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, indeed. Oh, there would have been a lot of integration under
cover.

JOHN EGERTON:

Such as, what kind?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Look at my complexion.

JOHN EGERTON:

Yeah.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

All of me didn't come from Africa, buddy. All of me didn't come from
Africa.

JOHN EGERTON:

Well, that kind of integration's been going on for centuries.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Been going on ever since they brought these little black girls over here
and put them out there in the cabin, and Marse Charlie can't control his
peter. So he goes down there in the cabins and says, "Come here, nigger
gal. I'm going to use you tonight." And he leaves a baby down there, and
when that little black girl comes up with the yellow baby, it tells the
story right there. That's better than a University Ph.D thesis.

Page 28

Yeah, whenever you see, down in the cabin, some
little black girl carrying around a little yellow baby.

JOHN EGERTON:

Do you suppose that that very issue, the whole sexual thing, maybe lies
at the heart of all the difficulties that white people have had facing
up to this issue?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I think so. I think it's the immorality of a double standard. They
pretend to be so saintly, so holy, so righteous. I tell you, go way back
over there, Thomas Jefferson had any number of little yellow babies on
his plantation. He admitted it. "I guess half of them are mine." He
admitted he had a bunch of kids. But in general, a white man would
father a baby and then deny it, see. Not some old scoundrel, some old,
no good, unprincipled white person took advantage of this black girl,
but no, he himself did it.

I told a young man who was up at the University of Michigan with me—he
came from, I think he graduated from the college department at one of
the Alabama schools, and of course, I came from Tennessee, and we ended
up both in the graduate school at the University of Michigan. We'd sit
down together, just fussing over some of the—this is back in 1931. Goes
way back before this period you're talking about, at the beginning of
the period you're talking about, before the 1954 decision. He said. . .
.

Page 1

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JOHN EGERTON:

You were talking about Tarlton Collier.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Tarlton Collier was as nice a person as we'd like to have for his time. I
made the point quite often for instance that at a national convention of
this Teachers Federation there were some teachers that came out from
Atlanta who wanted to establish two chapters in Atlanta, one black and
one white. I took the floor and argued against it and this man, I had
checked up on him, who was a big promoter. I said, "Ladies and gentlemen
there are some people who were reared in the South and who have perhaps
gone out of the South on occasion but have gone back to the South to
settle and establish themselves in their careers. But here is a man who
comes from the city of brotherly love. He spent most of his life in
Pennsylvania and now he is down here in Georgia, in Atlanta, and he's
promoting a dead issue that the whites of the South are trying their
best to eradicate." I said, "That's what I don't like about some of
these northerners who go South and out southern the southerners.

JOHN EGERTON:

But Mr. Johnson, here's really at the heart of what I wanted to ask.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Wait a minute, do you see the connection there between Tarlton Collier
and Mark Ethridge? Both of then came from deep South and both of them
were showing how they wanted to. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

They didn't fit the stereotype. But here's the point that I find hard to
understand. Here is Louisville, Kentucky, in 1946, 47, 48, it doesn't
have a Talmadge for a governor. It

Page 30

doesn't have a
Bull Conner for a police commissioner or any of these racist segs for
mayor. It's got Wilson Wyatt, it's got Barry Bingham, it's got Mark
Ethridge and Tarlton Collier. It's got Lyman Johnson, it's got Frank
Stanley with a newspaper that had been there since the thirties. It's
got Central High School and it started in 1888, Atlanta didn't even get
its first black high school until the forties. Atlanta didn't get a
single black policeman until 1948. And Louisville had a black
representative in the state legislature in '36. I'm saying if this much
had been accomplished, why didn't this city go ahead and do the rest of
it? Why didn't it become the national model of an integrated city?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

The only answer I can give is why do negros satisfy—look how good we are
to you. Now, don't bug us too much. Don't bug us anymore. Then they
would do all that you just mentioned. Just look around, look around.
What did the superintendent tell me when I asked him? I was leading a
committee of black teachers fussing and scuffling, trying to get equal
pay with white teachers back in 1939, 40, and 41. We were getting
fifteen percent less pay. When we were given a job, we would be put on
the schedule with white teachers and then clipped fifteen percent for no
other reason than the fact that we were black. The superintendent called
me out one day. He had brought out five negro principals and five negro
counselors and me. He had eleven of us negros out there in his board of
education. For an hour and a half, practically every statement he made
was, "Mr. Johnson don't you see how nice Louisville is in comparison
with

Page 31

Birmingham and Atlanta?" I said, "Mr.
Superintendent, right out of your office upstairs I've already got my
information. Your statistics department furnished me with the
information. I think at one of the cities, I think Birmingham, I'd be
getting fifty-six percent of what the white teachers make. Over in
Atlanta, I think it was sixty-four percent." He said, "You're not
satisfied with eighty-five percent?" I said, "Hell no, I want one
hundred percent." I said, "That's your trouble Mr. Superintendent. I've
got a Master's Degree from the University of Michigan and you've got a
man teaching in the white high school who's got a Master's Degree from
the University of Alabama and he's making fifteen percent more money
than I do. He teaches the same number of students and he teaches out of
the same text books. We have the same number of classes, the same number
of days per week, the same number of hours per week, and he gets fifteen
percent. I've got a Master's Degree from the school that doesn't
recognize the school that the man got his Master's from." I said, "How
do you explain that with fairness?" He said, "If you are not satisfied
with the way that we treat negros why don't you quit?" I said, "It's
because I don't want to quit. You'll have to fire me."

JOHN EGERTON:

I see what you are saying.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

He was trying to show me I ought to behave.

JOHN EGERTON:

You ought to be satisfied.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

He said, "Aren't you satisfied? You're making eighty-five percent, you
show that you know what is going on. If you lose your job here, where
else in the state of Kentucky will you

Page 32

get as much
as you get here?" Well, I guess in Bowling Green I would have gotten
about sixty-five percent.

JOHN EGERTON:

So the very fact that you were ahead of other people was used as an
excuse not to go anywhere else.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

They were, should I use the word smug, sacrosanct. There was sort of like
a feeling like, "we are so much better than Birmingham. Oh, my goodness,
Mobile, Alabama, you might not get fifty percent. In my home town in
Columbia, Tennessee, they offered me fifty-five dollars a month.
Columbia, Tennessee, fifty-five dollars a month for a year beyond a
Master's Degree. And I said, "Mr. Superintendent, how much if a young
white teacher started out with no experience. I admit I have no
experience as a teacher, but I do have a heck of a lot of academic
credits." I said, "If a white teacher comes in with a Master's Degree
and a year beyond a Master's in their field, not in education courses
but in their field, how much would you give him?" He said, "One hundred
and ten dollars." I said, "You give him a hundred and ten and you give
me fifty-five." He said, "you see, that's the schedule, you get fifty
percent of what the white people get." I said, "you can take the job and
stick it up your ass." My father would have said, "son I didn't teach
you, that isn't the language I taught you." I said, "papa, this is a new
day."

JOHN EGERTON:

Alright, so we went on through the fifties and bits and pieces of the
South came straggling along to the starting line and by 1954 when the
Brown Decision came down it was like the beginning. It wasn't the
accomplishment of anything it was just

Page 33

the very
start after all those years. And it has taken Louisville just as long
now or almost to get where it is as Birmingham and Atlanta and
Richmond.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I think it is in the book there. Somewhere you may have picked it up but
I used to be on the Board of Education here. I found the Board of
Education and I chided the Board any number of times in open sessions.
I'd say, "Oh, my God, Mr. Superintendent, and fellow Board members you
are dragging your feet on this business of integration. The home town
that I come from and the little town down there where the Ku Klux Klan
started, Pulaski, Tennessee, are so far ahead of you in integration that
you ought to go down there and find out how to do it." I told them.

JOHN EGERTON:

Do you think that left to its own devices the South would ever have done
voluntarily what it finally did when the blacks went to the streets and
Supreme Court handed down the decision that they handed down?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Hell no.

JOHN EGERTON:

Never would have happened?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

No, I'd be out there picking cotton if it hadn't been for the Civil War.
They may have looked at me and said, "he's a pretty smart Nigger. We'll
make him supervisor over a bunch of other damn Niggers." They would have
made me a head waiter.

JOHN EGERTON:

But, the desegregation of the society never would have happened?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Hell, no. No indeed. There would have been a lot of integration under
cover.

Page 34

JOHN EGERTON:

What kind?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

Look at my complexion. All of me didn't come from Africa.

JOHN EGERTON:

That kind of integration has been going on for about two centuries.

LYMAN JOHNSON:

It has been going on ever since you brought these little black girls over
here and put them out there in the cabins and Master Charlie can't
control his peter and so he goes down in the cabins and says, "come here
Nigger gal." She was nice and he would leave a baby down there and when
that little black girl comes up with a little yellow baby it tells a
story right there. That's better than a university Ph.D. thesis.
Whenever you see down in the cabin some little black girl carrying
around a yellow baby. . . .

JOHN EGERTON:

Do you suppose that very issue, the whole sexual thing, maybe lies at the
heart of all the difficulties that white people have had facing up to
this issue?

LYMAN JOHNSON:

I think so, it's the immorality of a double standard. It pretends to be
so saintly, so holy, so righteous. Thomas Jefferson had any number of
little yellow babies on his plantation, and he admitted it. He said,
"half of them are mine." Yes, he admitted he had a bunch of kids. In
general, a white man would father a baby and then deny it. He himself,
he'd think that some old scoundrel, some old no good unprincipled white
person took advantage of this black girl. I told a young man who was up
at the University of Michigan with me and he graduated from one of the
Alabama schools and I, of course, came

Page 36

from
Tennessee, and we ended up both in the graduate school, University of
Michigan. We were seated out on the yard there just trussing over
some—this is back in 1931, it goes way back before the period you're
talking back, before the 1954 decision—he said. . . .